Stir
by Fail with Eloquence
Summary: As much as he wanted to solve the mystery, he wishes now that he hadn't done. 11/Clara. Immediately post-NOTD.


**Disclaimer:** Doctor Who belongs to Steven Moffat and the BBC. Not my characters, just my feels.

**Spoilers:** The Name of the Doctor

**A/N:** I haven't completed any fanfiction in over a year, and I've found that I really struggle writing Doctor Who fics that over like 300 words. It's not really a good excuse, but I tried. I hope you enjoy it enough anyway. Reviews are always appreciated!

* * *

The Doctor stands at the edge of his timestream, his back straight and his arms full of one impossible girl, and he stares at the man before him. Right at the back of his head, and he thinks that if Clara's weight wasn't pulling on his arms, the self-repressed memories leaking into his conscious might have pulled his heart down to the ground and he would've never gotten up again. But.. No. That's a demon for another day.

As much as he does or does not want to know, to fully remember, the Doctor turns away from himself and he doesn't look back, not today. And not alone, he knows. He can't do this one alone.

But for now, there are bigger problems at hand. He glances down.

He still has yet to save _her_.

She's a dead weight in his arms, and as soon as he's made it out of his timestream, words are falling from his lips and onto the ears of Jenny, Strax, and Vastra, going on and on about how he can't talk now, he can't explain, he just needs to get back to the TARDIS, and then he's sprinting out across the barren graveyard that is Trenzalore, the three of them in tow. He remembers then, two steps from her doors, that the TARDIS experienced quite a bit of trauma getting them there, or trying her best not to, but as soon as he's thrown them wide open, she springs alive and within seconds, they're far, far away from that god-awful place, and he hopes, prays, that he won't be back there for a really long time.

On the surface, he seems panicked, terrified. And in _a lot_ of ways, he is. He dashes about the console room with Clara held tightly to his chest, awkwardly flipping switches and checking monitors. Jenny and Vastra exchange a couple of concerned glances and Strax offers, in his way, to put his nursing skills to good use, but the Doctor won't let her out of his arms. Once he's satisfied that everything is alright with the TARDIS, that she isn't going to accidentally dump them in the middle of World War 7 or throw them into a supernova, then he slows down, just for a second. He begs them to stay put (he doesn't know where they could go when they're floating in deep space, but that's beside the point), and tells them that he's off to the infirmary, but that isn't at all where he ends up. No, the TARDIS knows him better than that.

All he wants to do is look at her. That's all that needs to be done.

He dashes through the first door that he comes to, and stops. Abruptly, and he's sure that one of his hearts skips a beat, or perhaps it simply pounds just a little bit harder. He stares at the room in front of him and smiles, dropping his head to meet Clara's, where he places a light kiss into her hair and mutters a small thank you to his old girl.

She'll be safe here.

The TARDIS created for her an exact replica of her room at the Maitland's. Everything, from the wallpaper to the bedspread to the old blanket thrown across the back of her chair and the half-open laptop on her desk. The curtains are drawn, but there's the light of an endless artificial sunrise shining through them. He knows that the TARDIS must've gathered this information from her when she was connected to the telepathic circuit. He carries Clara to her bed, and despite himself, his hearts both nearly burst this time when he notices the plate of Jammie Dodgers sitting on the table. One of them is half-eaten.

_Must've been a strong memory, then._

He pulls back the covers and lays her down, taking the time to tuck her in properly. He stares at the Jammie Dodgers, and he stares at her. He doesn't even think about leaving her side, because for as long as he's been alive, she's never really left his. _Impossible_ girl.

He can hardly comprehend it himself. A couple of days ago, a few hours ago, she knew about him only what he chose to tell her and what she had gathered through her own brilliant human intuition. Now.. she knows things about him that he barely remembers himself. She knows about Gallifrey. She knows about the Dalek Asylum and Victorian London and all of those other times that he somehow just managed to scrape through with his life, well.. He can only assume now that that was her as well.

She knows him, she's saved him.

And even before she did, she sacrificed herself for him without thought. And it was the ultimate sacrifice. She knew the consequences - River had made sure of that, not that she had put up much of a fight to actually stop her from doing it. And while she'd made it out physically unscathed, a miraculous feat in and of itself, he still had to watch in horror, immobile on the floor, as she smiled at him and ran straight into that light, as she ripped herself into hundreds of thousands of pieces, scattered herself along his timeline just to keep him alive, always.

And when she wakes up, she's going to have one hell of a headache.

He loses it then. Sinks to his knees, clasping onto her limp arm to steady himself from the gravity that has suddenly leashed an aggressive attack on him from all sides. His eyes are stinging, his throat is so tight, and then his face is wet and his body is convulsing with the weight of his sobs.

Oh, _Clara.._

As much as he wanted to solve the mystery, he wishes now that he hadn't done.

* * *

When she wakes, for a second, Clara doesn't know where she is. She can't see, she can't hear, and she's hit with a wave of panic as she tries to resurface through half-remembered memories and past lives and deaths and eventually, she's staring at her ceiling, in her room, and as the panic ebbs away, she's left feeling as exhausted as she ever has. She makes to move off the bed, to push herself up, but her head feels about as big and hot as the Eye of Harmony.

"Shh.." The Doctor's hand is on her shoulder, pushing her gently back down into the bed. "Your head will be feeling like that a little while longer," he explains, his voice soft. "Your mind has to sort through and process all of the new information that it's receiving, to accommodate it all."

He's sitting on a chair next to her bed. He's wearing his round glasses, the ones that she rather fancies on him, with a book open in his lap. He had been resting his feet on her bedside table until about thirty seconds previously, and he'd been considerate enough to leave her one whole Jammie Dodger.

She looks him up and down wearily before closing her eyes again. She doesn't say a word. He looks exhausted and his clothes are sort of strewn on his body but he's there and she won't complain. They sit in silence for a little while, the Doctor drawing a complex series of circles on her temple with his finger. She recognizes this as Gallifreyan and yet, she doesn't know what it means.

Eventually, the Doctor pulls the glasses from his face and begins again. "River's gone, Jenny and Strax are okay," he explains. "They're alive. I let Strax do a full scan on you a few days ago, before I dropped them back off in Victorian London and he tells me that you're okay."

"A few days ag-" She starts, but he brings his finger up to her lips.

"Approximately four and about seven hours and 38 minutes. At least, I think so.. Jumping into your own timestream, it really does mess with your sense of time and let me tell you, Clara Oswald, that is one thing I definitely don't want to be doing again."

"You're a knob for doing it at all," she says. She wants to sound angry, frustrated with him, but she's not, really. She's sure he knows that his voice was her beacon, not the leaf.

"Even if I wasn't, I would've," he says, and his tenderness has her leaning further into his hand.

"How long have we been back in London?" she asks him, and his face suddenly lights up like a quasar. He leans towards her a little bit, biting his lower lip.

"We're not in London," he whispers to her, as if he's sharing with her a great secret that he really shouldn't be. "We're somewhere just on the outskirts of the inner core of Hoag's Object. Last time I checked, anyway.." He trails off for a moment as he suddenly realizes that he's left the TARDIS unsupervised for quite some time. But he shrugs it off and then: "The TARDIS did this for you!"

She beams back at him. Surprisingly, she's rather touched. "Seriously?"

"Well, I suppose, considering that you picked her out for me, she-"

"You remember that?" she cuts him off this time, her surprise almost pushing her into an upright position. He smiles fondly at her.

"I do now, yes. But that's one of the only things."

"I hardly remember anything," she admits quietly, half-ashamed that she hasn't been able to retain all of the information yet, like she's letting him down for that. The emotions are there, tearing at her chest, and she knows that there are things that she's probably better off forgetting. But all she remembers are his faces. She remembers Victorian London and a handful of incidents with his second, fifth, and sixth reincarnations that most certainly didn't end in her own death. She doesn't remember much of Gallifrey but remembers the TARDIS, and she doesn't even remember the Dalek Asylum, though she remembers him telling her about it when they stood on the edge of the TARDIS engine room (and his shoulders fall in relief when she tells him this.) Everything else is just beyond her fingertips, like a dream that faded all too quickly. She thinks that she's woken up too soon.

"Sometimes," he shifts to sit beside her on the bed this time, leaning over her, staring at the collar of her shirt and playing with her hair. "Sometimes, the brain pushes things to the backs of our heads, locks them up so they can't hurt us, or drive us insane." His words are so soft, but a certain darkness flashes across his face, and Clara takes his hand into her own. "It protects us."

"I didn't want to forget, not all of it." She places her hand on his face now, tugging at his jaw so that he'll look at her. "Help me remember, Doctor," she pleads. "And let me help _you_."

His face seems to collapse, and she's almost certain that he's either going to refuse, or straighten up and bolt right out of the room, leaving her with some flustered excuse about having to reconfigure the TARDIS Matrix or play with the levels of chlorine in the swimming pool. She knows that he'd rather run through a shower of bullets or face an army of angry Zygons than deal with his past, so it's a surprise to her when he says okay, his voice failing on that second syllable.

He closes his eyes almost in defeat and drops his face to hers. Her breath catches, and she's sure that she stops breathing completely when he presses his lips to the very corner of her mouth. It's more of a feeble attempt at closeness than it is a real kiss, but this is the closest his lips have ever been to hers, and it sends a current down her limbs anyway and her body falls into a blissful numbness. She reaches a hand into his hair and one to his jaw, and she closes her eyes as well.

They stay like this for minutes, inhaling each other's carbon dioxide. She likes how he smells and he can't get enough of her. But eventually, he lifts his head to plant a proper kiss on her forehead, and then he stands. He straightens his bow-tie. There's a blush across his cheeks and he smiles at her, but he doesn't flounder over his words.

"Clara Oswald, my Clara.. You _always_ help me."


End file.
